>Lets hope one day we get the DynaBook finally

I’m eagerly looking forward to that day!

I notice that quite a few people are criticising Apple’s publicity regarding the iPad, pointing out that other companies already released similar devices in the past. Therefore (the critics say) the iPad can’t be claimed to be defining a new product category.

However, the question isn’t “who first had the idea for a product category?”. or even “who first released a product in that category?”, but “who first released a product in that category that was sufficiently usable and useful?”.

We’ll have to wait and see whether the iPad lives up to that potential.

Perhaps your most contentious comment is that “The competition doesn’t seem to be learning the lessons”.

On the one hand, competing manufacturers surely have learnt the lesson that usability has prime importance. On the other hand, the question is whether competing manufacturers are able to act on that understanding. They need to show that they can bridge the “knowing-doing gap” – which I addressed in an earlier blog posting.

Spot on!

This is a”new-market disruptive innovation” (which I’m sure it will be followed by an associated business model and service by the time it ships) although it may initially appear as just an evolution of the eReader as we knew it until now.

Here’s a reminder….
“Disruptive technologies: Technology Innovations that in the near term result in worse product performance, but nevertheless bring to a market a different value proposition, that had been available before, which ultimately is sufficient to precipitate the leading firms’ failure.” –The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen, Harvard Business School Press, 1997

Lets hope one day we get the DynaBook finally

I’m also impressed with Apple’s price and costing strategy and particularly how pricing escalates. You could buy the basic iPad although I’m betting there will be plenty of profitable upsells. The miniSIM may not be liked by us when we want to trade out our SIM’s… yet the primary targets for the device aren’t on iPhones. No SD slot etc.. No camera… none of these things make any real difference to first generation sales. They help it hit their price point. They keep the product simple and should provide it with a better focus as it evolves.

The iPhone still sucks on features 3 years later. The camera on my N95 was way better. Yet I happily accepted the tradeoffs and won’t go back. Apple was just easier to live with. The competition doesn’t seem to be learning the lessons.